"It’s time" to meet our obligations: Education for what?

Abstract

In 1972, after Whitlam’s "It’s Time" victory, it seemed to me that a better world was possible. Education, health and social services were revitalised. There was reform in the air and in those days reform meant ‘to make better to improve’. These days, ‘reform’ is again being spoken about - but it has a new meaning. Welfare ‘reform’ means loading more obligations onto the shoulders of those who are unemployed, have a disability or who are single parents. Kevin Andrews’ (2005 [a]) industrial relations ‘reform’ amounts to squeezing even more out of an already-stretched workforce. In such an environment, the health ‘reforms’ of “Medicare plus‿ result in less bulkbilling and greater costs accruing to individuals and families for private medical and pharmaceutical services. Brendan Nelson’s educational ‘reform’ means increasing student’s Higher Education Contribution Scheme (HECS) debt, demolishing student unions and limiting students’ access to services.

These databases contain citations from different subsets of available publications and different time periods and thus the citation count from each is usually different. Some works are not in either database and no count is displayed. Scopus includes citations from articles published in 1996 onwards, and Web of Science® generally from 1980 onwards.

Citations counts from the Google Scholar™ indexing service can be viewed at the linked Google Scholar™ search.

Full-text downloads displays the total number of times this work’s files (e.g., a PDF) have been downloaded from QUT ePrints as well as the number of downloads in the previous 365 days. The count includes downloads for all files if a work has more than one.